Architecture is ripe for the creative and experimental options that a tool like 3d printing gives. Emerging Objects is the result of that fusion. Emerging objects comes out of the unique opportunities that 3d printing lends to architecture when it comes to experimenting with material, form, and scale. The ability to both experiment and prototype while producing a finished product is hard to achieve with another manufacturing process.

The phrase “Emerging Objects” comes from architectural and artist duo Virginia San Fratello and Ronald Rael. Together they explore experimental materials in 3d printing with the hope of influence emerging architectural practices. Two of their previous projects show how 3d printing can challenge ideas of function and aesthetics in design.

The Seed Stitch Wall – Ceramic Wall Cladding

The Seed Stitch Wall is a prototype for a 3D printed ceramic wall cladding system. Whereas most applications of 3D printing demonstrate how 3D printing allows for mass difference, Seed Stitch is an exercise in mass complexity and allows the influence of the hand, gravity, temperature, and the attempts of a machine to print an unstable shape, to produce difference.

Burl – 3D Printed Wood

Burl is a product of the 3D printing of wood, exploring the forms and thickness that is possible with this as an emerging material in additive manufacturing. Like a burl found in nature, this burl contains cracks, deformations and dense layers of growth rings—a product of the layers of manufacturing.

The Runcible looks beautifully designed and I don’t doubt that it has the potential to offer a unique experience.

The trouble begins with the supposed criticism over the lack of “sustainability” in modern electronics manufacturing. The only “sustainability” presented in their product is the wood back. No mention of the electronics or the source of those materials, the labor, mining source, economic and trade conditions being sustainable. Or at the very least transparent.

https://vimeo.com/170746821

Video can’t be loaded: About Runcible (https://vimeo.com/170746821)

Electronics with Values

The fairphone isn’t sexy but at least it does a better job at addressing issues of efficacy and transparency. Given it’s more realistic approach to modularity and repairability, it would seem the fairphone would give you a more useful long term product. Perhaps not as aesthetically appealing, but the device and its manufacturing address the nature of built in obsolescence and disposable electronics. It does so in a more meaningful way than “heirloom” every will.

Sustainable Credentials

A small point of contention also comes from the description of reclaimed plastics from shorelines as “fished from the Great Pacific Plastic Island.” That description seems to lend even greater emphasis to the devices “sustainable” credentials. The source of the material is most likely a company like Envision Plastics, who reclaims the material from beaches, either washed up or collected before it can reach the water. It’s a small distinction but important. The use of ocean born plastic waste in recycled products is laudable. But the emphasis in the advertising on the “Great Pacific Plastic Island” as the source of the material suggests it’s not about the sustainability, since collecting plastic from the pacific garbage patch isn’t sustainable, but the feeling it gives.

A convoluted smartphone is not anti-smartphone. Abstracting out common functions like making a phone call, and requiring additional peripherals (Bluetooth) to make it work isn’t a novel user experience and challenges notions of interaction and engagement, it’s an anti-pattern.

Devices That Last

It is laudable that the device is easy to disassemble and the software is open source. We can only hope to see this in other electronics. But given the electronics involved in this device, this is hardly “repairable” to the vast majority of users (not to mention the fictitious future family member cherishing the device). Especially those who are likely to buy it for the novelty, internet-of-things, experience. Many of the complex electronics we own today are repairable but are made difficult to do so by design and lack of information for those equipt to make the repairs.

The price of finding someone willing to repair it is likely to outweigh just replacing it. I am doubtful that sentimental value will trump convince, assuming the device ever garnered enough affection to warrant the consideration. The theoretical ability to upgrade doesn’t mean there will ever be upgradable parts, especially when manufacturing something with novel shapes.

That’s not to say that there won’t be those who love the runcible enough to continually tinker with the electronics and the source code, but the advertising does not seem aimed at them. The advertising gives the impression that it will be for people looking for a unique aesthetic or novel digital experience. For which it will likely deliver. But early adopters are not the same as makers or electronic aficionados.

The Value of Nostalgia

Which, in the end, makes the “heirloom” notion of this device, absurd. The use of the phrase seems to play more heavily on the value of nostalgia than the qualities of long-term reliability and usability.

Maybe I have focused too much on the phrase “Heirloom Electronic”. What makes something heirloom is more than anything addressed in the video or in my post. It’s an emotional and historical connection to an object. Objects with a sense of history, and a place in time, for an individual or individuals who will cherish that experience. In the same vein, sustainable long lasting electronics are more than just unique designs and materials.

It’s the convolution of these two objectives that fails. One does not solve the other.

I can applaud what product designers are attempting to do in breaking with set conventions, both in materials and design. The Runcible delivers a different approach to living and interacting with electronics in our lives. But finding a solution to the closed source, unrepairable, obsolete, disposable nature of high-cost, high-value electronics, may have to look elsewhere.

Artists have always used whatever materials that science and engineering made available. What Keep has accomplished is to use the tools of scientific discovery to capture beauty directly. A genuine art pioneer, Keep has long used computer software to develop new ceramic forms. With an abiding interest in the hidden numerical code that underpins all of Nature, he has developed a working process whereby the shapes of his creations are written in computer code. This digital information is passed through his studio-based DIY 3D printer—no less an engineering achievement—that he adapted to print in clay. Push the button and Eureka! Layer by layer, his pots (I prefer to call them artworks because they are certainly the children of his mind) are printed out. It is a sort of mechanical pottery coil building. After printing, the ceramic object is glazed and fired in the normal manner.

From the elemental forces of earth, fire and water, pottery has traditionally drawn on nature for inspiration. In using computer code to create this work, I aim to add a further layer to include the elemental, natural mathematical patterns and structures that underlie all form. This work illustrates just how much we are connected at a very deep level to the natural world.

Keep built his own 3D printer based upon a robotics model. The “ink” in Keep’s ceramic printer is ejected using a clay extruder made from parts adapted from the adhesives industry. We are seeing the future and it is full of Icebergs. Only Luddite sailing aboard their own little Titanics need fear these seas.

Video can’t be loaded: Rare Earthenware – Full Film (https://vimeo.com/124621603)

While journeys to extraordinary places are the cornerstone of luxury travel, this project follows more well-concealed journeys taking place across global supply chains. It retraces rare earth elements, which are widely used in high end electronics and green technologies, to their origins. The film, developed with photographer Toby Smith, documents their voyage from container ships and ports, wholesalers and factories, back to the banks of a barely-liquid radioactive lake in Inner Mongolia, where the refining process takes place. Unknown Fields Division, in collaboration with Kevin Callaghan, have used mud from this lake to craft a set of three ceramic vessels. Each is sized in relation to the amount of waste created in the production of three items of technology – a smartphone, a featherweight laptop and the cell of a smart car battery. The resulting film and 3 vases will be on display at the V and A from the 25th of April.

Structural hierarchy and material organization in design is traditionally achieved by combining discrete homogeneous parts into functional assemblies where the shape or surface is the determining factor in achieving function. In contrast, biological structures express higher levels of functionality on a finer scale through volumetric cellular constructs that are heterogeneous and complex. We focus on water-based materials and demonstrate additive manufacturing of diverse constructs associating shape-informing variable flow rates and material properties to mesh-free geometric primitives. This enables virtual-to-physical control where structural, mechanical and optical gradients are achieved through a seamless design-to-fabrication tool with localized control. The tool is an enabling technology that combines a positioning robotic arm and a multi-syringe multi-nozzle pneumatic deposition system. It can extrude materials with viscosities ranging from 500cPs to 50.000cPs at room temperature such as; hydrogels, gel-based composites. Certain types of clays, organic pastes, resins, and polyvinyl alcohols could also be integrated. The materials present visco-plastic or visco-elastic behaviors inside airtight barrels and undergo slow curing from pastes to solids at room temperature. The platform has the capacity to structure such materials in local, regional and global organizations providing functionally-graded structural and optical properties to the overall construct. The work provides an opportunity to research large-scale digital manufacturing of sustainable, biocompatible and biodegradable structures for a variety of applications such as: tissue scaffolds, prosthetic wearable devices, or temporary architectural structures.

In collaboration with Dr. Javier G. Fernandez and Dr. James Weaver (Harvard Wyss Institute). This technology was developed to support an ongoing group project commissioned by the TBA- 21 Academy (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary). Key contributing UROP: Daniel Lizardo.

Additive Manufacturing of Optically Transparent Glass developed by the Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with the Glass Lab at MIT.

Ancient yet modern, enclosing yet invisible, glass was first created in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt 4,500 years ago. Precise recipes for its production – the chemistry and techniques – often remain closely guarded secrets. Glass can be molded, formed, blown, plated or sintered; its formal qualities are closely tied to techniques used for its formation.

From the discovery of core-forming process for bead-making in ancient Egypt, through the invention of the metal blow pipe during Roman times, to the modern industrial Pilkington process for making large-scale flat glass; each new breakthrough in glass technology occurred as a result of prolonged experimentation and ingenuity, and has given rise to a new universe of possibilities for uses of the material. This show unveils a first of its kind optically transparent glass printing process called G3DP.

G3DP is an additive manufacturing platform designed to print optically transparent glass. The tunability enabled by geometrical and optical variation driven by form, transparency and color variation can drive; limit or control light transmission, reflection and refraction, and therefore carries significant implications for all things glass. The platform is based on a dual heated chamber concept. The upper chamber acts as a Kiln Cartridge while the lower chamber serves to anneal the structures. The Kiln Cartridge operates at approximately 1900°F and can contain sufficient material to build a single architectural component. The molten material gets funneled through an alumina-zircon-silica nozzle. The project synthesizes modern technologies, with age-old established glass tools and technologies producing novel glass structures with numerous potential applications.

The G3DP project was created in collaboration between the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab, the Mechanical Engineering Department, the MIT Glass Lab and Wyss Institute. Researchers include John Klein, Michael Stern, Markus Kayser, Chikara Inamura, Giorgia Franchin, Shreya Dave, James Weaver, Peter Houk and Prof. Neri Oxman.